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Comment by JCM9 | Hacker News Reader

I find the “demoting” term amusing / inaccurate. He’s in a career position to do basically whatever he wants and is doing just that. That seems like the ultimate role / achievement that’s far higher than any position on an org chart. Like a startup founder that realizes being CEO isn’t all it’s cracked up to be and they just want to go back to building, which is what they truly enjoy in life. Congrats and more power to you.

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"I'm demoting myself to Chief Do Whatever I Please Officer" hits a little different than most demotions.

yeah, looking at this from this lens makes it much more of a no-op

I wish I could do the same lmao

Exactly. These people are centi-millionaires and beyond employment, promotions, bonuses and all that usual drudgery. I guess the article is funded purely not to injure egos. But, hey, what is all that downscaling of YC? The article is clearly official press release and paid for.

> These people are centi-millionaires

They have $10,000?

The dictionary suggests this means they have $100 million. Likewise centibillionaire means $100 billion.

What dictionary is that? Im American and even here we learned hecto means 100 in 1st grade.

Centi means 1/100th. (1) e.g. centifoot = 1/100th of a foot.

(1) https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/centi

centifoot... You had centimeter right there! "Americans will do anything to avoid using the metric system" lol

Yeah would've made way more sense. Either that or centigrade.

centipounds?

“American Football is a game of centiyards, not feet.” — Official Hand-egg rulebook

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/centimillionaire

Reminds me of how financial newspapers often use a small "m" when describing millions of something. "$500m", or even worse "500m USD"... The engineer in me says that's 50 cents!

In-depth discussion in this topic:

https://xona.com/2006/12/17.html

Hecto- is the Greek root for 100, centi- is the Latin root for 100.

The metric prefixes up to 1000 use Greek roots for the large prefixes (10^+n) and Latin for the small (10^-n), but there are also words that are derived directly from the respective Latin roots and therefore don't necessarily carry the metric system's fractional meaning.

Someone already linked to the definition of centimillionaire, but here are a few more:

* centipede (100 legs, not 1/100 of a leg)

* centenarian (100 years old, not 1/100 of a year old)

* millennium (1000 years, not 1/1000 of a year)

Centiliter = 0.01L

Hectoliter = 100 L

Centipede = 100 legs

Etymology is more complicated than "look up the prefix in the metric system tables", and OP is correct about the definition of centimillionaire.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/centimillionaire

Centipede is Entomology

Brilliant, I laughed out loud

I know it is a word people use, and "centi-" is ambiguous without no context, but it's extremely unambiguous in the context of units of measure, and the word "hundred-millionaire" already existed and had the same number of syllables, so it's a really awkward choice.

You: logic

The English language: "allow me to introduce myself!"

Centennial = 100 years

Centurion = Commander of 100 legionaries

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